As Gretchen Coombs in her article “Postcards from a Bohemian Theme Park” points out La Pocha Nostra’s project El Corazón de la Missión [The Heart of the Mission, 2007-08] was a performance project taking place in San Francisco’s Mission District which dealt “effectively with race, displacement, nationhood [and] gender,…” (Coombs 195). The participants of the tour were able to explore the Mission District through the “windows of an immigrant bus” carefully observing the happenings in the streets (Coombs 195) while listening to audio recordings of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and experiencing live performances by Violeta Luna. This presentation will attempt to introduce the audience to some of the tours visual and audiovisual fragments inviting them to retroactively participate in La Pocha Nostra’s performative exploration of the district’s cultural, and at the same time personal, geography. The recreation of the bus route and the visited sights will allow to show that El Corazón de la Missión was an active attempt to narrate a race specific heritage of this district by specifically addressing contemporary social issues like segregation and forced displacement. Issues which are currently overshadowing the the district’s everyday life. The presentation attempts to highlight that it was particularly through the playful restaging of the tourist and travel industry’s perspective that the Latino artists managed to secure their unique cultural heritage, skillfully mixing two seemingly separate entities, namely spectacle and cultural critique.
About the presenterAstrid Kaemmerling
Astrid Kaemmerling currently is a PhD Candidate at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. She graduated from TU Dortmund University, Germany, in 2012 having earned a B.A. of Arts, as well as an M.A. of Education in Art and English and is currently in her 3rd year at Ohio University. She is interested in the role of art in urban gentrification. More specifically, her work examines San Francisco’s Mission District. As interdisciplinary researcher she is invested in practicing art-based research that allows her to combine her studio arts background with her scholarly interests in urban culture.